[MUD-Dev] Re: You think users won't number crunch and statis

[Matthew R. Sheahan]

Adam Wiggins propagated a meme to the effect of:
> Yes.  The haste spell comes straight from D&D, where the effect was (I
> believe) to increase your number of attacks per round by one for a certain
> amount of time depending on the level of the caster, and aging you one
> year in the process.  Thus it was very useful, but expensive to use
> frequently.  Muds that attempt to be faithful to D&D usually have it work
> this same way, except I suppose those that deem the age penalty as too
> harsh.

not being much on faithfulness to D&D, i'd consider that not so much harsh
as cheesy.  we don't do much with aging yet, but we have a generalized
speed/haste/slow system that doesn't depend on any particular spell, and
what's planned for when aging matters more is that haste that operates by
biological means should age you (haste multiple squared) times as fast.
so basic double-speed haste, while in effect, would age you at 4x rate.
this is meant to reflect the same thing as the 1 year aging from D&D, that
biological systems aren't fully prepared to handle the load.

importantly, not all haste effects we have are biological; there are
some chronomantic haste effects that just decouple your time rate from the
universal, and those would only age you at the rate of the multiple.

something i think is fairly important about aging systems that i don't
really see discussed often is the issue of just how long an "average"
character should last.  my plan is to have a human character with normal
start seriously feeling the effects of aging after about three years of
realtime, being likely to die of old age a year or two later.  i get the
impression this is a long time relative to other people's implementations,
but this is a 6-or-7-year-old MUD i'm talking about.  so what i'm asking
is, what sort of playability spans are you envisioning, and why?

								chiaroscuro